Origins
It all started with a litle comic I drew when I was bored in school. That must've been in 7th or 8th grade. With time passing my drawing and painting skills evolved and I put more focuss on the whole thing. I drew lots of sketches of the characters and developed a whole world around it all. I think it was around 1998 that I started to write a book based on the story. I'm still writing, developing new elements around the story and hoping that one day it'll be finished ;) The comics This is where it all started. Many dozens of pages of tiny comic strips, hand-drawn and colored with crayons - and mostly unrecognizable by now. Well, times have changed and so have my methods. Getting a scanner I started to use the computer to colorize the drawings. Work went quicker and I focused more on the preproduction than the actual drawing itself. Today I'm still reluctant to buy an actual digital drawing board as I still fancy the oldschool way of drawing. The original comic series pretty much revolves (very roughly) around the events of the Hedrecian Feud and the Dhilani Invasion of Bricera, with many characters present in some form or another, though not necessarily with their final names, looks and personalities. Oddly enough the comics were greatly inspired by popular movies that influenced kid-me at that time, the main themes being Disney's The Lion King™ and Star Wars™. So, imagine a bunch of anthropomorphic Lions flying around in Star Destroyers and you get the rough picture. On a side note, the original Title of the series was simply LIONS with a number of Episodes: # LIONS: Battle of Kings # LIONS: (no subtitle, I checked!) # LIONS: Darkness returns or Shadow's Return (sorry, original was in German) # LIONS: Dalor's Revenge # LIONS: Shadows over Silumir (later to be renamed Shadows over Bricera) Novelization Sounds grand, doesn't it? Well guess what, it isn't. It's what you get, when you give a 15 year old geek a computer to write stuff. Reviewing the old story with today's eyes, I can all but roll them. Still it laid the foundation for all of this. Shadows over Bricera was the novelization of the fifth LIONS comic. After being tired of hand-drawing and coloring it time and again I decided to put it into written form which was much easier to edit. The early story draft of the first novel revolved around the events of the Dhilani invasion of Bricera, starting off with the arrival of the Dhilani Leviathan and closing on a happy end after the Battle for Bricera. Fin. Or was it? Nope, a certain geek felt he had much more to tell so I wrote on, starting off a second story and rewriting half of the original one to have a few more twists and, most of all, a cliffhanger to lead up to the next one. Boy am I glad nobody actually ever got to read that :o. The second, so far unfinished book goes halfway through the Briceran Crusade up to the point where Dhalarona Prime is destroyed and Vince is arrested for speaking up against Jarris Vaylon. Everything past that moved on to be told through the XWA campaign and lateron the various battle threads.